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Stephen Downes endorses Hillary Clinton’s recent comments on internet freedom. I especially appreciate his reminder that the value of the internet arises from the participation of all of us, both individually as users and contributors of content, and collectively through the publicly funded research which made it all possible

Scott Leslie may be on the right track with another 1/4-baked idea - OER “virtual reference librarian” at EdTechPost, but I suspect that it may be less with the idea itself than with the doubt he expresses as follows:

<<Is “discoverability” even actually the problem with resources getting reused, or is it possible that the whole model is so flawed, so disconnected from how educators construct course materials, that it wouldn’t make any difference..?>>

Commenter Mike Caulfield followed up on this with

<<the really interesting thing is how many people said they wanted that, and how few people contact us for help>>

Some educators want a complete package provided by a publisher while others want to develop their own way of engaging students with the material.

In the space between those two extremes it would seem that there was ample room for a style of preparation which involved searching for and combining the best of what is available, and many of us think that is where we belong - but when push comes to shove we bifurcate and either go with a complete package or “roll our own” completely.

As variously a creator, organizer, and user of OERs I think I may have gained some insight into why this is the case.
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This story speaks for itself.

It is always interesting when a probability question produces a counter-intuitive result, and the following “glimpse a heart” question is a wonderful example of that:-

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hardproblemsmovie.com is the website of a documentary made about the US team in the 2006 International Math Olympiad.

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Although American students on the whole rank well behind many countries in mathematics, American math Olympiad teams regularly finish among the top teams. While aiming to inspire and entertain, Hard Problems provides an insightful and thoughtful look at the process that produces successful teams, and ultimately, great mathematicians of the future

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The first part of the above quote raises some interesting questions about how educational effort should be prioritized.  Does effort directed to strong performance at the top levels compensate for, or compete with, that needed to maintain the basic levels of verbal and mathematical literacy that are needed for effective democratic decision making (as opposed to the woefully ill-informed nonsense that passes for debate about health care in the US for example)?

From the MathForum newsletter:
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David Crockett Johnson was perhaps most famous for his children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. From 1965 until his death in 1975, Crockett Johnson painted over 100 works relating to mathematics and mathematical physics. Of these paintings, eighty are found in the collections of the National Museum of American History. They are presented on this site, with related diagrams from the artist’s library and papers.
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BBC NEWS | Special Reports | Free market flawed, says survey.

A couple of recent additions to the arsenal of reasons for promoting mathematics education are this recent article by Ian Stewart in the UK Telegraph and the collection of ‘Math Matters - Apply It’ posters developed by SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics).

The Stanford Study of Writing provides a welcome counterpoint to some of the nonsense that has been put about regarding impact of the internet on literacy.

Stephen Downes points to Chad Adelman posting on Crossing the Finish Line - a recent book about university graduation rates by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos & Michael S. McPherson.

I haven’t read the book but am suspicious of any attempt to draw conclusions about social policy from statistical analysis - especially in reviews and commentaries that isolate particular statements about how variables are correlated (and even more so if they include references to “predictive power” going “below zero”, since statistical power is defined as a probability and  a correlation of minus one has a very strong predictive power in any reasonable sense of the term).

A common “paradox” pointed out to students in an introductory statistics course is that it is possible to have a variable S (for, say, SAT score) that is positively correlated with some measure, say G, of success (eg graduation) in each of several subsets making up the whole of a population - while being negatively correlated in the population as a whole.

One way this might happen, for example, would be if there was a characteristic I (for, say, Inspiration) which was very highly correlated with G, and such that among the high I part of the population S was only weakly correlated with G but in the low I population S was very strongly correlated with G.

If among the population as a whole (in this case university entrants) low I was correlated with high S, then entrants with high S would be more likely to be in the low I group and so less likely to graduate and so S might be negatively correlated with G - even though in each of the low and high I groups separately, higher S does contribute to increasing G.

Of course, many readers of this  (if in fact there were any) might then say “but if I is the best predictor of G, let’s just use it and forget about S”.

And maybe they are right.  At least if the goal is soley to maximize the G rate we should just ignore the low I group and concentrate all of our efforts on those with the magic I factor.

If only we could identify it we could do away with all that “high stakes testing” and give our attention to those who deserve it.

Well the good news is that I have found I.

The bad news is that it is not Inspiration.
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Media Democracy Day Vancouver - November 7, 2009 | Media Democracy Day.

The Back Page article by Joseph Ganem in this month’s APS News suggests that nominal content and student capability outcomes in US high school mathematics are moving in opposite directions - and attributes this largely to attempts to introduce abstract topics before the students are ready.

This year’s Blog Action Day is devoted to the theme of Climate Change and an understanding of mathematics is certainly essential for anyone involved in making making decisions about how to respond to this issue (which in a democracy is presumably all of us).

The choice of Math and Climate as the theme of this year’s Math Awareness Month emphasized this connection, and Murray Bourne at squareCircleZ  today points to a number of articles in which he has used related topics as a source of examples for teaching mathematics.

A good source of background on the science of CO2 related climate change is this excellent history prepared by Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics, as is also the RealClimate site managed by a team of well-reputed climate scientists, and the question of how to compare the effectiveness of different policy choices is addressed in this on-line book by UK physicist David McKay (reviewed by theRegister).

The fact that no amount of restraint or conservation can counterbalance the harmful effects of increasing population is not often noted in the CO2 debate so I was a bit disappointed that Murray did not include his discussion of that topic in his list.

Since my institution has started using WPMu for faculty and departmental websites I had better have a look at this from bavatuesdays (which came to me  via Stephen Downes).

xkcd - A Webcomic - Locke and Demosthenes.

Inventing cute mnemonics is fun, and the process of inventing and checking them may help reinforce the definitions, but beyond that they really are useless - and I believe they do more harm than good when people actually try to use them.

It takes much more time (and mental effort) to correctly recall and decode one of  these than anyone who needs to use the terms can afford. And there is a much better way.

Just think ‘Sine is the Side’ or  ‘Cos goes Across’ (we don’t need both)

This takes negligible time to decode, reinforces the concept directly, and is immune to the vagaries of failing memory. (Was that “All Old Teachers, Happily Out Camping, Have Amnesia Sometimes ” or “Odd Aged Teachers Are Happy Campers On Hot Sundays”?)

Recently Facebook has been running very slow for me and even just hanging completely on page reload. I wasted a lot of time trying things within Facebook and after reading of many others with similar problems was even considered abandoning Firefox as my preferred browser, but as soon as I disabled the  Skype Firefox extension everything returned to normal. So if you are having similar problems, this may be the solution. (The extension is not necessary for the normal use of Skype - just for having phone numbers on web pages all become clickable.)

What disappoints me about Skype as a result of this is not the fact of the problem per se (making different programs interact is often difficult and it is not surprising that things go wrong), but rather the fact that there has been no loud public warning from Skype of a problem which has been around for some time (in fact the extension is still loaded automatically without warning during Skype upgrades).  If Skype had acted appropriately there would have been a high ranking Google hit which resolved the issue but in fact on Googling Facebook and Firefox I found many discussions which did not identify Skype as the source of the problem, and there has been no warning transmitted during several recent Skype upgrades.

This interview with a recent convert to teaching math using interactive white boards includes a lot of good ideas for using the computer display but  leaves me wondering what the IWB adds over what could be done with a tablet PC and projector.

One weakness of the WB is that it forces the presenter to face away from the audience for writing - something we are all used to and try to mitigate, but which could be avoided with the old style projector.

A possibly distinctive use of the IWB might be to have students come up and interact with it themselves, but the interviewee actually seemed to be saying that she tried that but found the benefits outweighed by the distraction of having people moving about so much.

Well I have finally got around to putting in my views at 8:50pm in Vancouver - which is still 10 minutes before midnight in Ottawa so should be within the 48 hour extension that was announced on the Copyright Consultations website on Sunday. …more »

I have always been a bit intimidated by bloggers’ talk of “Trackback” and “Pingback”, and am still unsure of whether they really do anything that isn’t just as easy to do “by hand”.

I recently came across a Tutorial written a couple of years ago by Teli Adlam which helped me to what I think is a bot better understanding but still leaves me wondering whether I am missing something.
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